Rahm Emanuel: An impatient mayor who always wants to be in control

Daley's successor has pumped vigor into City Hall, but it's not as simple as the public image he aggressively promotes

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will mark his first year in office on Wednesday. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

The small stack of index cards tucked into Rahm Emanuel's suit jacket pocket are emblazoned with the mayoral seal and covered with blue ink.

Revised every other day, the tasks on the most high-powered to-do list in Chicago track with the mayor's six overarching goals. Ask him what those are, and Emanuel starts to list them: longer school day, City Colleges overhaul, budget reforms, rebuilding the city. Then he stops.

"There are two other items. I'm not saying," the mayor says. "Big items we're well on our way to implementing."

The note cards and the exchange illustrate a few things about Chicago's new mayor. He's focused. He thinks ahead and lays groundwork. Above all, he prefers to be in control.

Come Wednesday, he'll have been mayor for a year. Emanuel has pumped vigor into a city government that often seemed sputtering on autopilot during Mayor Richard M. Daley's final years. Initiatives proclaimed to rein in spending, cut red tape and ignite a building binge have come whipping out of City Hall like the relentless Chicago wind they call the Hawk.

It's been a fast-paced 12 months from an impatient politician who likes to stick to the script and for the script to be stuck to. The meticulously cultivated narrative Emanuel has tried to fashion is one of a dynamic, imaginative boundary-breaker who's pushing the city forward largely out of the sheer force of his sharp strategic mind and even sharper elbows.

But as the mayor's script has played out, he's also displayed a willingness to pivot on some of the promises that helped him win the office.

He pledged to stem a chronic financial crisis without tax hikes, then unleashed a menu of new and increased fines and fees so broad that Chicago is more expensive for most.

He vowed an end to insider politics, yet gave the hard sell to a controversial speed-camera program that could benefit his onetime campaign manager.

He is the self-proclaimed champion of transparency who has proved to be secretive.

Daley had 22 years to remake Chicago. Emanuel is just getting started. Still, a year into his term provides a benchmark moment to look at how he's governed, what he's achieved and the challenges ahead. Emanuel, the consummate politician, has been planning for this moment since before he even took office.

Inside City Hall

"It's been more change at every level in a shorter period of time than at any other time in the history of the city of Chicago, and I challenge anybody to say otherwise." — Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Tribune interview Aug. 18recapping his first 100 days in office.

Chicago provides a comfortable executive chair for its mayor to use when he presides over City Council meetings. Emanuel rarely sits in it.

The mayor stands for two hours or more, peering down from the dais at the 50 aldermen seated beneath him. Intentional or not, it is body language that sends a very clear message of power.

What may be most remarkable about Emanuel is not that he's visibly put his stamp on city government or bent the City Council — hardly an arsenal of defiance — to his will. It's how quickly he's managed to do it.

The formula was both simple and elegantly suited to Emanuel's hard-charging personality. From day one, he has declared the city to be in crisis mode. There's been the budget crisis, the infrastructure crisis, the jobs crisis, the child safety crisis.

And a crisis is no time to dither over details. So pass his water rate hike, his quasi-private public works plan, his speed-camera measure. Now.

"I'm not in the position of analysis," the mayor said last month. "I'm in the position of getting things done."

Emanuel's relentless hustle is a response to his time in Washington, the capital of gridlock. The glacial pace in Congress was agony for him, but as Chicago mayor, he's able to make things happen with the swiftness he wants.

Declaring a crisis and rushing in with a solution has been the source of both many of Emanuel's biggest year-one accomplishments and controversies.

His first budget initially included a provision to dramatically hike vehicle sticker fees for heavier passenger vehicles including SUVs because, Emanuel said, studies show they cause outsize damage to city streets. But no such studies exist.

He sought City Council approval for new restrictions on public demonstrations, saying at the time that the rules would be only temporary to help deal with large protests expected at next weekend's NATO summit in Chicago. But it turns out those rules are permanent.

He berated the Tribune for failing to report on a city study detailing how red-light cameras, the cousins of speed cameras, have cut traffic deaths. But an aide later acknowledged the administration never released the informal analysis and said "study is a bit of a term of art."